Security safes and vaults for home and commercial use, including for the storage of guns, ammunition, important papers and other valuables or items, are well known and are collectively referred to herein as a “safe” or “safes”. The term “guns” as used herein includes but is not limited to handguns, pistols, rifles, shotguns and other types of firearms. Typical safes are constructed to form a rectangular box having a hollow interior space used for storage and protection of guns, valuables and other items. Protection may be from unwanted intruders or from fire or water damage. A security door is hingedly attached to either a top or side panel of the safe's frame to provide access to the interior space and to protect the safe from unwanted intrusion. Security doors may be constructed with enhanced security features, such as multiple locking bolts or pins that simultaneously project from or retract into one or more sides of the door. The locking bolts or pins extend either behind a door frame or are inserted into apertures within the door frame to secure the door in a locked position. Safes may also include fireproof layers or additional protective layers in the structure of the rectangular box, which typically reduce the dimensions of the interior space and the available storage area therein.
Typical gun safes employ shelving systems with shelves supported by both side walls of the safe and a vertical board that divides the interior space into two distinct areas. The vertical board is typically placed in a position to provide a first area that is about one-third of the width of the interior space and a second area that is about two-thirds of the width of the interior space. The safe may be configured to have, for example, shelving across the entire width of the interior space above the vertical board and/or shelving on either side of vertical board. The interior space may include an open bay for storing rifles (or other types of long guns) on one or both sides of the vertical board, and the opposite side may include shelving. However, long items cannot be stored horizontally in a safe with a vertical interior dividing board, and the vertical interior dividing board limits shelving configuration options and occupies valuable storage space. It would therefore be advantageous to provide a more flexible storage system with no vertical interior dividing board to open up the shelf space for wider or longer objects and optimize the cubic storage area within the safe.
Most manufacturers design safes from the outside in, starting with a steel casing and adding insulation to form an interior compartment, and then making a shelving system to fit inside the safe's interior compartment. Shelves in safes are typically formed from wood boards covered with carpet or another textile material, and cut to the width and depth of a safe's interior compartment. In other words, the size of currently available shelving is determined by and limited by the size of the safe's interior compartment. Safe manufacturers offer many different sizes of safes, and each safe size requires a unique size shelf designed to fit into the safe. It is therefore difficult and expensive for safe manufacturers to build, stock and supply customers and dealers with a unique size shelf for every safe size that they sell. That would require hundreds of unique shelf widths and depths. The current state of safe manufacturing also makes it difficult for safe manufacturers and dealers to provide consumers with a variety of options for setting up a safe's interior compartment.
Because of the expanding uses and demand for commercial and personal safes, there is a need to address the weaknesses of traditional safe interiors and provide safes with unparalleled versatility, to improve facilities to enable flexible and inexpensive storage systems for safes, and enable widespread manufacture and stocking of such parts.